Many online merchants employ a “build-up and buy” shopping experience, in which a customer chooses multiple potentially unrelated items to purchase. The items are aggregated into a shopping cart and then, when the customer is finished shopping, all of the items are purchased at once in a single checkout transaction. The electronic shopping cart and checkout processes are meant to parallel those used in a conventional bricks and mortar store. One reason for such an arrangement is to ensure that customers feel as comfortable as possible with the online transaction. In the early days of e-commerce, customers were not accustomed to buying online. Thus, where possible it made sense to provide physical world metaphors for the buying process (e.g., virtual shelves, shopping baskets, and a check stand) to help facilitate the move from the physical world to the online world.
With such a shopping cart/checkout arrangement, there are two distinct phases: shopping and buying. During the shopping phase, customers browse the site and build up a group of items they would like to purchase (by adding the items to the shopping cart). Once that phase is finished, the customer navigates to a checkout page and buys all of the items at once by moving through the checkout. The separate shopping cart and checkout processes ensure that customers are given a strong decision point right before making their purchase. However, this “build up and buy” approach does not actually reflect how most people make their buying decisions. Typically, consumers decide to buy an item at the point where the item is placed into their shopping cart, not at the checkout.
Today, customers are significantly more comfortable shopping online than they were in the past. Most customers no longer need physical world metaphors to feel comfortable shopping online, and instead demand faster, more streamlined buying processes.